I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that corruption actually is all around

 "As crimes pile up, they become invisible"

-Bertolt Brecht

Donald Trump was the most nakedly corrupt president of my lifetime.  This corruption had many direct effects, including the continued redistribution of wealth and power from the working class to the rich and disastrous responses to crises such as Covid and Hurricane Maria.  But what might be an even more corrosive effect of this is how numb we've become as a result.

To be clear, corruption did not begin with Donald Trump nor did our desensitization.  But there were three aspects of Trump that metastasized this phenomenon into something potentially fatal.  There was so, so much of it.  It was all so plainly obvious that it was comical.  And it was performed by a man who is the literal stereotype of corruption (old, white, rich, and buffoonish).  This all made it easy to refute him, but it also made it easy to accept everything that's just slightly less outrageous because, well, at least it's not him.

This acquired malaise manifested in a couple notable ways in the last week.  First, Joe Biden's nominee for Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was revealed to have collected millions in speaking fees for some of the most odious institutions known to man.  This is the very definition of corruption as this money is spent with the express intention of securing influence and ensuring that the recipient is now beholden to their interests.  Or, put another way:

"Yet it is Yellen who is the more consequential — and possibly more worrisome — appointment. That the Dow and the S&P rallied at the announcement is not surprising since as Fed Chair, she continued Ben Bernanke’s policies of quantitative easing, or buying the big banks’ toxic assets both to keep them afloat and use them to infuse money into the economy in order to ward off a recession.

Fox News said “Wall Street Loves Janet Yellen” since she represents “easy money” for the banks, with one commentator saying, “It’s a sign there won’t be anything extreme.” For both High Finance and Big Tech, having Yellen instead of Elizabeth Warren is a sign that Biden is unlikely to regulate them beyond the weak Obama-era Dodd-Frank legislation."

It should be easy to denounce this sort of practice, and yet the response was predictable:

There is plenty more where that came from, including my favorite one here.  You can ignore the misogyny angle that many of these people employ, as it's simply the easiest thing to latch onto if you're trying to fire off a hot take with minimal effort.  Focus instead on how people are willing to look the other way when a transgression isn't the worst one they can possibly imagine.

To be fair, a nominee for the Treasury isn't the most salient news item to most people.  It's at least partly understandable that corruption in this arena would fail to spark one's imagination.  So let's turn to something we all intimately understand: the pandemic.  Possibly the only positive that has come out of this whole ordeal is the realization of just how incredibly good we are at creating vaccines.  And yet even this triumph is stained by corruption, as it was recently revealed that the Moderna board of directors would cut in line to receive their inoculations before the rest of us.  This is admittedly not the largest crime against humanity ever committed, but it is still a fundamentally corrupt act.  It is still people in positions of power using that power to enrich themselves at the expense of others.  And yet we're willing to wave it away:

It would be one thing if Moderna were some sort of worker-owned co-op, or the board consisted entirely of people who had strived to develop this vaccine.  But in our neoliberal reality, Moderna received $2.5 billion of our money to produce this vaccine and the board is composed of folks such as this:

It is very good that the majority of us can acknowledge Donald Trump's corruption and that he paid the electoral price for it.  I will take whatever positives I can out of our current situation.  But we're never going to actually root out corruption if we can't even acknowledge it.  And we're never going to build something better if we can't imagine it.